As Twitter are about to stop allowing use of Basic Auth I have updated the Twitter friends timeline web part to use OAuth.

When you add the web part to the page you will be directed to the Twitter OAuth login page once. After that the authentication token and secret are persisted in the properties of the web part although only the token is browsable.

To change the account being displayed simply clear the Token property in the Miscellaneous section of the web part properties and you will be prompted for a new set of credentials.

As a bonus I have also included a Twitter search web part. This does not require authentication but does require you to provide a search term in the Miscellaneous section of the web part properties.

TSG is teaming up with SUGUK to present the next user group session in the north east.

Tony Hughes from Microsoft Partner TSG who will lead us through methods to exploit Sharepoint functionality in the small to medium Sharepoint Enterprise.

This session bridging the technical, development and business audience will be both interactive and enlightening. It will cover how list enhancements in Sharepoint 2010 can be deployed to allow integrated data solutions, dip into the exploitation of Excel to create Business Intelligence, show us how to take advantage of Key performance Indicators and dashboards in Sharepoint, delve into how we can use Sharepoint Designer to create valuable data views and step into the critical realm of document management to show the importance of and approaches to document Version Control and Approval Routing.

When Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was in beta, and for some time after it was given a full release, the level of support and documentation available was, at best, pretty sketchy. Over time Microsoft have improved what is available on MSDN and Technet as well as publishing best practices but what really saved MOSS 2007 and the people who work with it was the SharePoint community who have done a great job in supporting each other with blog posts, forums, wikis, white papers and the like.

Given that history, it is fantastic to see the amount of information being made available before the public beta of SharePoint 2010 is even released. As the NDA on SharePoint 2010 was lifted at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas there was a veritable blizzard of blog posts from various SharePoint insiders.

Another brilliant developer post on the factors that could persuade asp.net developers to start using SharePoint comes from Jeremy Thake the man behind SharePoint Dev Wiki. This is a wiki that was started as a reaction to the lack of a definitive resource for SharePoint developers and has become the place to go for reference material and guidance on SharePoint development. The site has now been extended to include a SharePoint 2007 Administration wiki and a shiny new SharePoint 2010 Development wiki which is already starting to be filled with content.

A communication method that wasn't available when the 2007 version was released was Twitter. Not being able to go to the SharePoint conference was frustrating but Twitter came to the rescue and at times it was almost like being there. Well, ok, maybe not but it did provide a rich stream of information about new features directly from the people who were lucky enough to be there. This allowed the people who couldn't be there in person to get a glimpse of some of the detail being revealed during the sessions and to see beyond the headlines of the keynote.

Back in the beta days of SharePoint 2007 it was often a case of feeling your way and piecing together bits of information from lots of different sources to achieve the end result you were looking for. I think I can say with some confidence that those bad old days are in the past for SharePoint. It is now a huge success story for Microsoft and they are supporting it better than ever with documentation and tools. In addition the community of people working with and supporting SharePoint has grown massively over the last few years and this is where a lot of the best content is going to come from. This time round the problem won't be the lack of information the issue will be that now the trickle has turned to a flood can we keep up with all the content being produced? This is where inititiatives like Dev Wiki can really help to put some structure to that content and also allows us to give authority to the best bits.

Have you come across any other great SharePoint 2010 posts that are worth sharing? If so please add them in the comments.